Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the quote: "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded"

Some of it is "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes". Fare enough, I've seen plenty of things I've found cool not get much attention. That's just the nature of the internet.

The other point is show and share HN stories growing in volume, which makes sense since it's now considerably easier to build things. I don't think that's a bad thing really, although curation makes it more difficult. Now that pure agentic coding has finally arrived IMO, creativity and what to build are significantly more important. They always were but technical ability was often rewarded much more heavily. I guess that sucks for technical people.

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> "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes"

HN has a very different personality at weekends versus weekdays. I tend to find most of the stuff I think is cool or interesting gets attention at the weekends, and you'll see slightly more off the wall content and ideas being discussed, whereas the weekdays are notably more "serious business" in tone. Both, I think, have value.

So I wonder if there's maybe a strong element of picking your moment with Show HN posts in order to gain better visibility through the masses of other submissions.

Or maybe - but I think this goes against the culture a bit - Show HN could be its own category at the top. Or we could have particular days of the week/month where, perhaps by convention rather than enforcement, Show HN posts get more attention.

I'm not sure how workable these thoughts are but it's perhaps worth considering ways that Show HN could get a bit more of the spotlight without turning it into something that's endlessly gamed by purveyors of AI slop and other bottom-feeding content.

I think it's just numbers. There are maybe a few dozen people that see your post on /new. That's a tiny sample size, not a good proxy for how interesting the post is. You see this on Reddit as well where the same exact post gets 1 upvotes and then finally blows up.

Chasing clout through these forums is ill advised. I think people should post, sure. But don't read into the response too much. People don't really care. From my experience, even if you get an insanely good response, it's short lived, people think its cool. For me it never resulted in any conversions or continued use. It's cheap to upvote. I found the only way to build interest in your product is organic, 1 on 1 communication, real engagement in user forums, etc.

It's a good reminder that instead of hitting "refresh" on HN, hit up /new for a bit and drop some votes. Probably the most significant votes you'll have in a longtime.

This is different. It's clear that the driver here is the ease with which you can use AI to spit out slop projects.

This is a forum called Hacker News. It’s for technical people. Perhaps these LLM-generated slop projects could get posted on Product Hunt or somewhere focused on the creative product side of tech and not technical knowledge and discussion

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